Of course not *anybody* can make a well-performing web app, just like not just anybody can make a well peforming Android app. Now that's a false equivalen

Of course not *anybody* can make a well-performing web app, just like not just anybody can make a well peforming Android app. Now that's a false equivalence if I've ever heard one. Making a well-performing mobile website that does more than display text is really difficult. The tools one uses to build and test websites are all geared towards desktop development. Only recently have we begun to see browser vendors adding support to their dev consoles for mobile devices, and those tools still aren't nearly as extensive as the tools one uses for native app development. Moreover, both iOS and Android have pretty decent documentation around how to use their APIs and what one needs to do to make an app that responds to user input nearly instantly. For the web... well, to call Javascript performance tuning folklore does a disservice to folklore. It's more like rumor and witchcraft. Speaking as a C programmer who was pleasantly surprised by the change Well, that sort of explains it, I guess. You moved from one platform with crappy tooling to a platform with ever so slightly less crappy tooling. Of course things look like an improvement to you. Meanwhile, to programmers coming in from Java, .Net, or other, more "corporate" languages, the lack of tool support for Javascript makes it really difficult to write good apps in a reasonable amount of time. Now you might just say, "Well those guys are just shitty programmers." Fine. I agree with you. But somehow, Android and iOS allow even shitty programmers to write functional workaday mobile applications. HTML and Javascript do not (at least, not on mobile). So by that standard, HTML/JS is an objectively worse platform.